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(2015)

(SPOILERS) Every so often, DreamWorks Animation offer a surprise, or they at least attempt to buck their usual formulaic approach. Mr. Peabody & Sherman surprised with how sharp and witty it was, fuelled by a plot that didn’t yield to dumbing down, and Rise of the Guardians, for all that its failings, at least tried something different. When such impulses lead to commercial disappointment, it only encourages the studio to play things ever safer, be that with more Madagascars or Croods. Somewhere in Home is the germ of a decent Douglas Adams knock-off, but it would rather settle on cheap morals, trite messages about friendship and acceptance and a succession of fluffy dance anthems: an exercise in thoroughly varnished vacuity.

Those dance anthems come (mostly) courtesy of songstress Rhianna, who also voices teenager Tip, and I’m sure Jeffrey Katzenberg fully appreciated what a box office boon it would be to have her on board. The effect is cumulatively nauseating though, like a sugar rush that just won’t dissipate, one that makes you sicker and sicker with each passing moment. Day-glo fizzy pop tunes daub over the deficiencies of plot, character and originality, accompanying action or montages to mindlessly euphoric effect; it’s the equivalent of a sitcom laugh track, exposing the basic lack of confidence in the material by bludgeoning the viewer with sentiments of happy-joy. As such, at one point, Oh, the alien Boov who befriends Tip (agreeably voiced by Jim Parsons), announces “This is not music. This is just noise”; it’s enough to make you long for the twee ramblings of Randy Newman, and I would never, ever normally condone such saccharine sensibilities.

The Boovs have invaded Earth, displacing the populace to other designated planetary areas in order to perpetuate their yen for fleeing whenever the fearsome Gorg encroach upon them. Tom J Astle and Matt Ember (the superior Epic) have essentially fashioned a vision of a benign universe, in which the worst that can be said of aliens is that they are stupid; Boov leader Captain Smek (Steve Martin, alas, in Looney Tunes: Back in Action over-exertion mode) is ultimately revealed to have brought down the wrath of the Gorg through inadvertently stealing their sperm bank during a peace meeting that absolutely echoes Adams’ meeting between the Vl’Hurgs and the G’Gugvuntts, only rather tepidly. There are numerous warnings about making assumptions of others throughout, from the true nature of the Gorg, to the Boov view that humans are just like animals, “simple and backwards”. And, of course, the humans teach the Boov a thing or two; in particular, Oh learns about courage. There’s even a lesson in art via Van Gogh (“It’s not about how they look, its about how they feel”).

This being an animation, plot holes tend to get a free pass, but I had to wonder how a 13 year-old girl is so au fait with driving (at one point Tip is overcome with concern over the absence of her mother, and it comes across as if the writers have only just remembered, at a very late stage, that she’s not an entirely self-sufficient, pro-active vessel for Rhianna), and the convenience of the alien equivalent of a text message (long gone are the days when writers would think up futuristic devices; now everything must be banally familiar) being sent to the entire universe (how does that work?) One wonders if the inoffensive Boov design comes consciously off the back of Minions; if so, it isn’t nearly as memorable.

Any movie that ends with “Now everyday is the best day ever” needs a shot of grounding to counteract its hyperbolic, bubble-gum pop sentiments and aesthetic, but Home only very occasionally reaches for something more. At one point Oh leaps into the ocean to restore his temperature to “happiness”, and there’s a moment of stillness as Tip sits on the bonnet of her modified car (pimped up, with the accompanying musical fanfare) waiting for his return. The design of the Gorg, and their reveal, is quite good, if reminiscent of the retconned Ice Warriors in Doctor Who. And tellingly, the best character here is Tip’s cat Pig, probably because no one can put mealy words in his mouth.

Most of the gags are fairly obvious, from Oh taking things literally (microwaving a cookbook, brushing his teeth with a toilet brush) to the usual splattering of toilet humour (Oh needs to Number Three at least once a year, which admittedly is a cut above usual standards, if not on the level of the seashells in Demolition Man), and that’s Home’s problem in the main. The ear-assaulting dance anthems and easy emoting aside, it’s a fairly inoffensive concoction, and a fairly obvious one. Tim Jonson started out so well with DreamWorks, co-directing what is still one of their best (and smartest) pictures Antz, but he’s slumming it with Home. Or maybe it’s down to that Katzenberg influence, doing his darndest to homogenise every detail of the DWA universe.

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She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

I fear I’ve snapped his Gregory.

Twin Peaks 3.14: We are like the Dreamer.
(SPOILERS) In an episode as consistently dazzling as this, piling incident upon incident and joining the dots to the extent it does, you almost begin to wonder if Lynch is making too much sense. There’s a notable upping of the pace in We are like the Dreamer, such that Chad’s apprehension is almost incidental, and if the convergence at Jack Rabbit’s Tower didn’t bring the FBI in with it, their alignment with Dougie Coop can be only just around the corner.

You’re never the same man twice.

The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)
(SPOILERS) Roger Moore playing dual roles? It sounds like an unintentionally amusing prospect for audiences accustomed to the actor’s “Raise an eyebrow” method of acting. Consequently, this post-Saint pre-Bond role (in which he does offer some notable eyebrow acting) is more of a curiosity for the quality of Sir Rog’s performance than the out-there premise that can’t quite sustain the picture’s running time. It is telling that the same story was adapted for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents 15 years earlier, since the uncanny idea at its core feels like a much better fit for a trim 50 minute anthology series.

Basil Dearden directs, and co-adapted the screenplay from Anthony Armstrong’s novel The Strange Case of Mr Pelham. Dearden started out with Ealing, helming several Will Hay pictures and a segment of Dead of Night (one might imagine a shortened version of this tale ending up there, or in any of the portmanteau horrors that arrived in the year…

Now you're here, you must certainly stay.

The Avengers 4.1:The Town of No Return
The Avengers as most of us know it (but not in colour) arrives fully-fledged in The Town of No Return: glossier, more eccentric, more heightened, camper, more knowing and more playful. It marks the beginning of slumming it film directors coming on board (Roy Ward Baker) and sees Brian Clemens marking out the future template. And the Steed and Mrs Peel relationship is fully established from the off (albeit, this both was and wasn’t the first episode filmed). If the Steed and Cathy Gale chemistry relied on him being impertinently suggestive, Steed and Emma is very much a mutual thing.

And you people, you’re all astronauts... on some kind of star trek.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
(SPOILERS) Star Trek: First Contact (also known as plain First Contact, back when “Star Trek” in the title wasn’t necessarily a selling point to the great unwashed. Or should that be great washed?) is probably about as good as a ST:TNG movie could be, in as much as it actively rejects much of what made the TV series what it is: starchy, placid, smug, platitudinous exchanges about how evolved humanity has become in the 25th century. Yeah, there’s a fair bit of that here too, but it mainly recognises that what made the series good, when it was good, was dense, time travel plotting and Borg. Mostly Borg. Until Borg became, like any golden egg, overcooked. Oh, and there’s that other hallowed element of the seven seasons, the goddam holodeck, but the less said about that the better. Well, maybe a paragraph. First Contact is a solid movie, though, overcoming its inherent limitations to make it, by some distance, the best of the four big screen outings with Pic…

So you made contact with the French operative?

Atomic Blonde (2017)
(SPOILERS) Well, I can certainly see why Focus Features opted to change the title from The Coldest City (the name of the graphic novel from which this is adapted). The Coldest City evokes a nourish, dour, subdued tone, a movie of slow-burn intrigue in the vein of John Le Carré. Atomic Blonde, to paraphrase its introductory text, is not that movie. As such, there’s something of a mismatch here, of the kind of Cold War tale it has its roots in and the furious, pop-soaked action spectacle director David Leitch is intent on turning it into. In the main, his choices succeed, but the result isn’t quite the clean getaway of his earlier (co-directed) John Wick.

Don’t get tipsy. We can’t have you hiccoughing in the coffin.

The Avengers 4.2: The Murder Market
Tony Williamson’s first teleplay for the series picks up where Brian Clemens left off and then some, with murderous goings-on around marriage-making outfit Togetherness Inc (“Where there is always a happy ending”). Peter Graham Scott, in his first of four directing credits, sets out a winning stall where cartoonishness and stylisation are the order of the day. As is the essential absurdity of the English gentleman, with Steed’s impeccable credentials called on to illustrious effect not seen since The Charmers.

Cool. FaceTime without a phone.

Sense8 Season One
(SPOILERS) The Wachowskis do like their big ideas, but all too often their boldness and penchant for hyper-realism drowns out all subtlety. Their aspirations may rarely exceed their technical acumen, but regularly eclipse their narrative skills. And with J Michael Straczynski on board, whose Babylon 5 was marked out by ahead-of-its-time arc plotting but frequently abysmal dialogue, it’s no wonder Sense8 is as frequently clumsy in the telling as it is arresting in terms of spectacle.

I frequently had the feeling that Sense8 was playing into their less self-aware critical faculties, the ones that produced The Matrix Reloaded rave rather than the beautifully modulated Cloud Atlas. Sense8 looks more like the latter on paper: interconnecting lives and storylines meshing to imbue a greater meaning. The truth is, however, their series possesses the slenderest of central plotlines. It’s there for the siblings to hang a collection of cool ideas, set pieces, themes and fascina…

He’s a good kid, and a devil behind the wheel.

Baby Driver (2017)
(SPOILERS) Pure cinema. There are plenty of directors who engage in superficial flash and fizz (Danny Boyle or JJ Abrams, for example) but relatively few who actually come to the medium from a root, core level, visually. I’m slightly loathe to compare Edgar Wright with the illustrious likes of Sergio Leone and Brian De Palma, partly because they’re playing in largely different genre sandpits, partly because I don’t think Wright has yet made something that compares to their best work, but he operates from a similar sensibility: fashioning a movie foremost through image, supported by the soundtrack, and then, trailing a distant third, comes dialogue. Baby Driver is his most complete approximation of that impulse to date.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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